When the new teacher walks into her classroom and finds just one piece of chalk, she demands an explanation.

“Supplies are running low,” the administrative assistant explains.

The teacher stares in disbelief. “The first day?”

Welcome to the New York City public school system. No, not today. You think these problems are new? Try 1964, the year Bel Kaufman published her beloved novel about what it means to be a teacher, “Up the Down Staircase.”

Six million copies and one major motion picture later, the book is still in print, Bel is still radiant at 89 and our schools are still overcrowded, understaffed and falling apart.

“My book was a straw in the wind that is now a hurricane,” says Bel.

And yet, insists the ex-teacher, there’s hope.

Tomorrow, Bel will address the midterm graduates at her alma mater, Hunter College (’34). While she hopes to inspire them to cure the world’s ills, she’s not exactly sure how she’ll say it. “I seize my audience and speak more or less impromptu,” Bel explains. “And with no false modesty, I must say I’m very good.”

So who needs false modesty? Chatting in the award-jammed study of her upper East Side apartment, Bel exudes energy. Her green, shell-shaped earrings match her green velvet jacket and shoes – “I love high heels!” she confides. She loves telling her story, too.

Bel’s introduction to New York’s public schools came in 1923, the year her family fled revolutionary Russia.

As successful Jews – the kind revolutionaries enjoyed executing – this was no simple proposition.

But the family was greatly aided by the fact that Bel’s grandfather was Sholom Aleichem, the Yiddish writer whose stories became the basis for “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“Even in the most anti-Semitic of times, Sholom Aleichem was always loved [by the Russians],” says Bel. They felt he understood the downtrodden. (Sure did. He died in poverty.) So her mother pleaded their case to the minister of culture, “And we got a private train from Moscow,” recalls Bel. “With a bodyguard.”

A boat ride later found Bel in the Bronx, a 12-year-old placed in first grade because she didn’t know any English. Propelled at last by necessity, she waved her hand and spoke her first word: “Mwoom?” Bel pauses with a smile. “I later learned it was, ‘May I leave the room?’ ”

The kindness of her teacher convinced Bel to become one too. But the quickness with which she learned English convinced Bel that bilingual education is a crime. “I learned because I had to learn,” she says. Why deprive today’s kids of that great motivator?

They’re deprived of plenty already, she points out: safe schools, small classes, a sensitive Board of Education.

But rereading “Up the Down Staircase” provides hope in a most unlikely way: by making us realize the good ol’ days weren’t much better.

Any warm, fuzzy feelings you might have harbored about public education a generation ago get tossed out a broken window in “Staircase.” The kids in it are snotty, cynical and scary. Some are homeless, some have rap sheets, one threatens his teacher with rape.

And yet that teacher – Bel’s alter-ego – manages to get through to most of them with her sincerity and spunk. And as Bel likes to tell teachers and students now, “Everybody remembers at least one great teacher.”

In these tough times, as in the tough times 35 years ago, and the tough times when Bel came to America, this much remains true: One teacher can always make a difference.

E-mail: [email protected]



Comments are closed.